Citation and License

Nanoscale Research Letters 2013, 8:303
doi:10.1186/1556-276X-8-303

Published: 1 July 2013

Abstract

Electrospinning technique is commonly used to produce micro- and/or nanofibers, which
utilizes electrical forces to produce polymeric fibers with diameters ranging from
several micrometers down to few nanometers. Desirably, electrospun materials provide
highly porous structure and appropriate pore size for initial cell attachment and
proliferation and thereby enable the exchange of nutrients. Composite nanofibers consisting
of silk and hydroxyapatite nanoparticles (HAp) (NPs) had been considered as an excellent
choice due to their efficient biocompatibility and bone-mimicking properties. To prepare
these nanofiber composites, it requires the use of acidic solutions which have serious
consequences on the nature of both silk and HAp NPs. It is ideal to create these nanofibers
using aqueous solutions in which the physicochemical nature of both materials can
be retained. However, to create those nanofibers is often difficult to obtain because
of the fact that aqueous solutions of silk and HAp NPs can precipitate before they
can be ejected into fibers during the electrospinning process. In this work, we had
successfully used a three-way stopcock connector to mix the two different solutions,
and very shortly, this solution is ejected out to form nanofibers due to electric
fields. Different blend ratios consisting HAp NPs had been electrospun into nanofibers.
The physicochemical aspects of fabricated nanofiber had been characterized by different
state of techniques like that of FE-SEM, EDS, TEM, TEM-EDS, TGA, FT-IR, and XRD. These
characterization techniques revealed that HAp NPs can be easily introduced in silk
nanofibers using a stopcock connector, and this method favorably preserves the intact
nature of silk fibroin and HAp NPs. Moreover, nanofibers obtained by this strategy
were tested for cell toxicity and cell attachment studies using NIH 3 T3 fibroblasts
which indicated non-toxic behavior and good attachment of cells upon incubation in
the presence of nanofibers.